From: Brent Allsop (allsop@fc.hp.com)
Date: Thu May 31 2001 - 18:08:18 MDT
"Harvey Newstrom" <mail@HarveyNewstrom.com>,
I have a question for you. I've enjoyed reading your
responses to Lee.
We are aware of a bunch of stuff at the same time right? For
example, there is the left side of our field of vision, and the right
side of our field of vision.... While we are aware of all this visual
stuff at the same time, we can also smell, hear sounds, are aware of
our body in this visual space.... Some how, our brain unifies this
into one unified conscious experience which we are subjectively aware
of all at once.
If we discovered how our brain does this we should also be
able to expand this conscious space right? We could do this by adding
to the cortexes that produce our current consciousness right? For
example, let's say an additional artificial visual cortex was grafted
onto your brain. Let's say this cortex was fed data from another
person's eyes. Let's say it was grafted into your brain in such a way
that the other person's spatial awareness from his eyes was projected
into your conscious visual world. Let's say you then experienced and
were subjectively aware of both visual views at the same time, within
the same subjective space or awareness. For example, if the other
eyes were looking at you, and at the same time could see behind you,
your awareness would expand to include an externally viewable
representation of you and it would include visual data of stuff that
was behind you, something like one would imagine if they had eyes in
the back of their head....
Now, imagine if it were possible to do this joining such that
the artificial cortex was a million miles away? Surely there must be
at least a very complex interneural communication system where
individual neurons in your brain could directly communicate with
nearly all the neurons in the remote artificial cortex.
Imagine that this could be achieved with more than just an
artificial visual cortex, but could be done with, say a twin's or
copies entire brain. With such, you both would be directly
subjectively aware of each other in the same conscious awareness. You
would feel and see everything he knows, and he would know the same as
you. There would be two representations in this joined subjective
world, one for you, and one for him, and they would both exist in the
same consciousness.
Perhaps it wasn't a twin, but a color blind person. You'd
both be obviously aware of the fact that red/green for one person was
experienced drastically different for the other. Since you were both
subjectively directly aware of each of your knowledge, you could
compare and contrast the difference just as you can now be aware of
the difference between say the taste of salt and the color of red, or
between a red tree in your left field of vision and a green one on
your right.
If you happened to be a copy on a ship that was tragically
about to fall into the sun or something, and this remote conscious
merge with your twin back on earth, was such that the representation
of you, your conscious knowledge of yourself, all of it's memories and
experiences and everything, could transfer over this mind meld link to
enhabit an expanded conscious world of your twin, would this lesson
your fear of the eminent death of one of you? Both of you, for as
long as the link could be maintained, would experience the pain and
suffering that the you will experience as you fall into the sun.
Of course, this is something like how I think things could
work, and if it could be done this way, it sure would lesson my fear
of being "transported", "copied", "uploaded" or whatever. If it
couldn't be done this way, and the old body would just be destroyed,
the different memories lost, no effing.... yes, to me, that would be
near the same as death, but I'd at least be somewhat thankful, that
the copy of me could go on existing.
Brent Allsop
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:07:52 MST